The present invention relates to switching of electronic social presence between devices and more particularly to the switching of electronic social presence between devices responsive to a separation between the devices.
The use of multiple different devices by a single individual to access social media and instant messaging, collectively called electronic social presence, is becoming more widespread. Although referred to as electronic social presence, the usage is not restricted to social purposes, but is also used for business purposes. In the workplace, the need to stay in contact with colleagues throughout the day and outside working hours has grown. Technologies exist to allow an individual to be constantly contactable through instant messaging on whichever device that individual is using at that time of the day. Typically, a user will be sat at a desk using a laptop whilst being “available” for instant messaging. The same user may leave their desk to attend meetings. For the duration of this period away from their desk the need to be “available” for instant messaging still exists. Existing technologies allow this to happen through the provision of instant messaging on mobile devices such as phones and tablets.
The use of instant messaging on various devices and platforms to tackle the need to be in constant contact is not new, however switching between devices is currently a problem. It is presently possible to log in from multiple devices and have an electronic social presence attempt to follow the individual by sending new chat notifications to the “most recently used device” where “most recently used” is an algorithm built into the application itself. An example of an application which does this is Google™ Talk. It is also presently possible to send notifications to all the devices on which an individual is logged in. An example of this is the Skype™ application. Sending notifications to a most recently used or sending notifications to all devices is not an optimal way of resolving the problem of allowing an individual to be constantly contactable. Known prior art discloses a method for changing a first device into a second device during a session. Information on the session is transmitted from the first device to the second device. Based on the received information, the second device is connected to the session and the first device is disconnected from the session such that the session is maintained. No state data for the session is transferred from the first device to the second device.
Known prior art discloses a method for uninterrupted communication sessions including automatically detecting, at a first device associated with a first user, a second device associated with a first user, and creating, at the first device associated with the first user, a network connection between the first and second devices, wherein the first device operates in a first medium and the second device operates in a second medium. A communication session may be transferred from the first device operating in the first medium to the second device operating in the second medium. Peer to peer communication between the first and second devices is used. If the network connection between the first device and the second device is lost before the communication session has been transferred, then the transfer will not take place. This may happen if the second device moves outside the operating range of a wireless network connection.
Known prior art discloses the switching of a user's sessions among devices using Bluetooth™ to handle the passing of the information relating to the session. If the Bluetooth connection between the transferor device and the transferee device is lost before the communication session has been transferred, then the transfer will not take place. This may happen if the transferee device moves outside the operating range of the Bluetooth connection. No state data for the session is transferred from the first device to the second device.